The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin has an interesting analysis:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and reform groups should now turn their attention to a real reform: removing the power of legislators to draw district boundaries ensuring their own re-election. Under an initiative that may be headed for the November ballot, that authority would be given to an independent commission.
If the Legislature had given up its redistricting power as it promised to do, we suspect that Proposition 93 would have passed easily.
Steven Greenhut at the Orange Punch blog has some good reasoning too:
Redistricting has assured that there are almost no competitive races. There are Republican seats and Democratic seats. The only way the legislators leave is when term limits force them out. So if you loosen term limits, legislators simply get to stay longer and build their fiefdoms with no accountability from voters. Eliminate term limits and you have as much turnover in California government as you had in Iraq, pre-invasion.
Redistricting would create competitive seats. Then, it wouldn’t be any big deal if you even scrapped term limits altogether. Competition is necessary in the marketplace, and it’s important in politics also. Maybe legislators have learned their lesson, but don’t expect that they did.
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